Shrinking Horizons in Hard Science Fiction - Review of The Three Body Problem and Aurora

I’ve been catching up with a few big SF titles recently: Cixin Liu’s Three Body Trilogy and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora. All have been enjoyable in that sense-of-wonder, mind-expanding way of great SF; Liu’s first book particularly unfolds with a trippy logic which seems all the more disorienting when it’s revealed to be so cruelly rational.

What’s fascinating to me (fair warning on spoilers, though I won’t be revealing any specific plot points) is that these books are built on the premise of human failure. They still celebrate rationality and triumph over adversity, and human ingenuity, and all that. But that's draped over a framework of hard limits and resignation and accepting what we’ve got.

This is definitely a shift from the ideas we used to seek in SF.

The golden-age of “Cowboys in Space” adventures have been behind us for a long time. This is a travesty to some, a victory for others. (Google “Sad Puppies Hugo Slate” for more than anyone could want to read about this debate.) Over three quarters of the stories in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 feature minority characters in same-sex relationships, and that’s fine. Asimov and Heinlein and their contemporaries wrote more than enough Golden Age era SF to keep any nostalgics reading for several lifetimes, so if classic SF is the only thing that floats your boat, well then, hooray for libraries–and ebooks!

In the meantime, Dystopian SF has dominated shelves (especially YA shelves) for decades now. Kids who grow up reading The Hunger Games just aren’t going to know what to make of galaxy-spanning utopias. Success is not part of the future they were promised. They have problems closer to home.

But Robinson is a hard SF writer. His Mars trilogy took on terraforming in more gritty detail than any other fictional treatment of the subject. And Cixin’s books are grounded in quantum mechanics and astronomy. Granted they have a fascinating measure of Sino-Soviet history mixed in, but as you get going through his science passages it’s hard to believe we aren’t going to figure this all out and come out on top.

This is the first time I’ve been hit with so much hard SF that argues: The Universe, it ain’t for us.

Robinson’s Aurora is a profoundly moving and complex generation-ship novel. Everything the cover-blurbs say about it being scientifically rich and exquisitely written is true. Its got human-scale stories set against a voyage across vast spaces that lasts over 300 years. It’s got a pulse-pounding physics problem that’ll have you biting your nails in the desperate hope for the perfect solution. Its the most touching and heartbreaking thing by I’ve ever read by Robinson. And his message is an important one: we’d better take care of this planet because it’s the only one we’ve got. The Earth isn’t just our birthplace. It’s our only place. Stripping resources from our home to voyage into space is irresponsible. Even more irresponsible is the idea of generation ships in the first place. Colonizing the universe by sending out multi-generational tin-cans might be a time-honored trope of hard SF, but it denies the human rights of its actors. The first generation might volunteer for such a mission, but their children don’t have any choice. Making that choice for them could be child abuse.

Sorry, far-seeing optimists. If you’re going with this plan you've got a lot to answer for.

The Three Body Problem is more sanguine on the possibility of moving into space. In fact, life is everywhere. Galactic expansion? Everyone’s doing it. But–holy crap!–that’s a huge problem.

If you’ve got a planet that supports intelligent life, you’re not the only species who'll want your real estate. And most successful life-forms out there have been around long enough to understand you’ll be itching for their homeland sooner than later. They'll want to wipe you out before you get too far from your gravity-well, and it’s best to do it before you have the science to put up a defense at all.

The reason SETI hasn’t found any signs of intelligent life is, most intelligent life is smart enough to keep its mouth shut. Only an idiot would go around shouting "Here we are!" in such a galaxy.

It’s hard to imagine a view of the universe more diametrically opposed to the Utopian visions of the 1950s and 60s.

This new stuff is good stuff. Beautiful. Poetic. It's thoughtful and speculative in the best sense of SF as “Speculative Fiction.” If we are ever to settle beyond our own solar system, it won’t happen without a thorough consideration of the issues raised by these novels.

And yet... I once met a baby-boomer engineer who was inspired to go into the sciences by watching the moon landing. He read the sort of fiction that taught the folks who pulled off the moon landing that it was our destiny to figure this stuff out, and to pull this stuff off. He grew up on optimism and decided to take part in what felt like an inevitable march towards the stars.

I wonder how much we're losing in this transition from “What if?” to “Yeah, but…”

I mean, kids today, they’ll still read some Asimov, right?

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Amazon affiliate links below:

Aurora is available here.

You can buy The Three Body Problem here, as well as the sequels The Dark Forest, and Death's End.